


and i'm thrown in the gunfire of empty bullets

by illuminatedcities



Category: The Blacklist (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-25
Updated: 2014-03-25
Packaged: 2018-01-16 23:30:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1365721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illuminatedcities/pseuds/illuminatedcities
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Liz probably should have known that Raymond Reddington could never be fascinated with something that isn’t profoundly flawed and dangerous.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and i'm thrown in the gunfire of empty bullets

**Author's Note:**

> AU roughly after 1.10, Anslo Garrick Pt.2.

If you ever meet him, he will introduce himself to you as Raymond Reddington. 

Feel free to call him Red though, he doesn't mind. He is a man who understands that the most terrifying words you could think of to describe him are nothing short of accurate.  
Believe me. He knows. 

 

\--

You will probably assume that Raymond Reddington is not his real name.  
You will probably assume that the things he tells you are not true.

(You will almost certainly be right.)

Open a dictionary and you will find:

 **red** , _noun_.

1\. any of various colors resembling the color of blood  
2\. the primary color at one extreme end of the visible spectrum  
3\. a revolutionary activist

see also: **seeing red** ; the experience of intense outrage or fury  
 **red revolution** ; a bloody, violent rebellion 

 

\--

 

In time, you will realize that he has already told you everything you’ll ever need to know about him. 

 

\--

If you ever meet her, she will introduce herself as Elisabeth Keen, although nobody calls her that. 

Liz is a garrote mind behind a face that is too sweet, too pretty. At the academy, she runs miles and miles every day until her muscles quiver with exhaustion and her socks are stained with blood. She sits at her desk in her cramped room with a stack of books and a pot of coffee until the lights on the streets flicker off in the morning. She gets into a fight with a guy from her class nearly twice her size who corners her in the gym. 

_Come on, let's see what you've got, princess. Where's that smart mouth of yours now?_

She kicks his legs out from under him and gives him a blooming bruise under his chin that he will carry like a shameful mark for weeks.  
She's 22 and she knows how it feels to be despised.

\--

It sounds the beginning of a joke: A man without a name walks into a bar.  
Only it isn't a bar, it's the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. and he walks straight into high security custody. 

\--

 

A woman walks into a bar, only it isn't a bar, it's an FBI blacksite and her name is Elisabeth, although nobody calls her that. 

She doesn't know anything about him. He knows absolutely everything about her. 

\--

 

This is where we'll begin.

\--

 

Liz meets Raymond Reddington and this is what happens: 

She’s in a car that crashes, her husband gets beaten to a bloody pulp, she waits for time to tick down next to a bomb.

All of these things have, naturally, to do with Red. 

He’s waltzing through their investigations with smugness fitted to him like an expensive suit, all charms and wit and arrogance.

(And god help them, he's _right._ )

 

\--

He calls her Lizzie and her skin crawls with the intimacy of it. 

She puts a pen in his jugular without flinching. He’s _delighted_. 

He casually shoots a man for her. 

Teaming them up to work together is about as good an idea as throwing matches at a puddle of gasoline. 

\--

 

They watch a building being swarmed by FBI agents like an army of ants in bulletproof vests.

“Maybe you have an intuitive understanding of the way the criminal mind works," Red suggests, leaning in close, like sharing a secret. 

“That's one of those things you say that sound like a compliment but end up being an insult.”

“Oh, Lizzie, never in a million years would I imply that you understand the morally bankrupt because you are one of them." The sun reflects on his glasses, hiding his eyes. "I’m sure plenty of well-adjusted people would put a pen in somebody’s neck just to prove a point.”

Liz keeps her eyes on the operation in front of her, flashing lights in blue and red and the distant buzzing of the radios, but something stirs inside of her at the memory:  
The way his hand closed around hers, tight, like he thought her capable of doing actual damage. 

“I think we would both benefit from you keeping any witty remarks about my psyche to yourself.”

“Have dinner with me,” Red says, unperturbed. Across the street their current number is hauled out of the door in handcuffs. 

“Goodbye, Red,” Liz says. She has already established that Raymond Reddington’s extensive vocabulary doesn’t extend to “No.”. 

“There is a restaurant in Nice that serves a delicious tart made of onions and anchovies." 

Liz walks right into the mess of black combat gear, flashing lights and moving vehicles.  
The best way out of Red’s gravitational pull is far, far into the opposite direction, like a planet spinning out of orbit. 

"Or maybe you’d like to try Farcis niçois, that’s stuffed vegetables with herbs. A local specialty,” he adds, raising his voice over the noise around them. 

“I’m not flying to France with you for anchovies,” Liz calls back. 

She doesn't turn around. Historically, few people have benefited from looking back when they weren't supposed to. 

“It’s no fun drinking a Château Rayas all on your own! ” 

She hears the indignation in his voice even from far away and allows her mouth to curve into a smile, indulging in a way he cannot possibly see. 

\--

 

When Liz started working for the FBI, she did not expect to witness the day when her husband would be dragged away into an interrogation room by her colleagues. 

When Tom comes back, she knows that they have buried something that once breathed between them, something now choking in the dark, wet earth. 

 

\--

 

“I know you have difficulties trusting people,” Tom says, after, not looking up from where he is working with his sleeves rolled up, hands in the soapy dishwater. 

“But I should have trusted you. I know.”

Liz determinedly cleans a chipped coffee mug with a towel. It’s her favorite, yellow porcelain with a fine crack running down one side like a strike of lightning. Flawed, but not without use. There’s no need to be a profiler to be appalled by the blatant symbolism. 

Tom dries his hands on a towel.

“I just want to forget any of this ever happened, Liz.”

She thinks about the dread of finding the wooden box under the floorboards, that hollow, consuming pain in her chest that was pushing the air out of her lungs like a blow. 

She thinks about that part of her that, even through the agony of losing her husband, was just glad to be done waiting. 

\--

All of this time of trying to have a normal life, and in secret she had just been waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

\--

 

Apart from the fact that being close to Red feels suspiciously like steering your car into an abyss, one of the few things she can accuse him of doing to her was turning her world upside down just by existing. 

Liz probably should have known that Raymond Reddington could never be fascinated with something that isn’t profoundly flawed and dangerous.

 

\-- 

After the incident with Tom, the interrogation and the doubts and the paranoia, Liz goes to Red to tell him exactly what she thinks about being lied to. 

_Go to hell_ , she says, with feeling, and watches something in his expression falter.  
Red blinks and then it's gone, sliding off his smooth exterior like water. God, such a _piece of art_ , his whole appearance, down to the polished tips of his shoes. She looks at him and sees a fabrication. _Everything about me is a lie._

She thinks of urban legends, alligators in the sewers, and wonders which of the stories people tell about Raymond Reddington are true, what kinds of monsters lurk in the depth of his muddy waters. 

Now that she has seen him flinch, it takes everything she has not to reach into the wound and pull, just to see if there is more in him that she can unravel with her touch. 

\--

 

The thing is: Of all the reasons that she has considered to explain his interest in her - turning the question of why around and around in her head like pushing at a bad tooth with your tongue - Liz has never considered that he might actually _care_. 

 

\--

 

They don't go easy on each other. 

“There is no way to force me to be wrong about this just because you’d prefer it that way,” Red says, with such superiority in his voice that it makes her teeth hurt.

They are in a conversation about Tom that she doesn't want to have, and she is clenching and unclenching her fist in the pocket of her coat. 

"Do you really think you can redeem yourself by bringing down people who are every bit as bad as you are?" 

It’s a long shot, and she can see it falls flat by the way he doesn’t even turn his head, the unspoken _Please, Lizzie, you can do so much better than that_ ringing in her head like a siren. 

"There is not a single thing in the world that could redeem me,” Red says. 

"Then why are you here?" 

He curls his lips into a smile like a weapon. 

"Because you haven't sent me away yet."

"Maybe I will," Liz says defiantly, jabbing at the elevator button with more force than necessary.

"Maybe you will," Red allows. 

 

\--

She pulls the trigger and fires the shots and expects something inside her to break, but it doesn’t, _it doesn’t_. 

Maybe the worst thing is to be scared of yourself, of standing in front of a box with bulletproof glass in a place that doesn’t exist, wondering on which side of the walls you belong.

\--

 

“We’re not partners,” Liz says, following Dembe into the room lined with shelves, books stacked on every surface, tumbling onto the carpet like stray leaves. 

She sits down at the opposite end of the couch. Sure enough, there are two glasses of red wine on the table. 

"So you keep telling me," Red says. He has a book opened on his lap, index finger pressed between the pages to mark his place. "What do you think we are, then?"

The stuff they strap to the pillars to make buildings collapse, Liz thinks.

“You’re an FBI informant, I am your assigned agent.”

He smiles patiently before handing her a glass, the glass stem delicate between his fingers. 

“What are we _to each other_ , Lizzie?”

There is a sharpness to his words, like he's ripping off a band-aid. 

“I honestly don’t know.”

“You were cross with me when you thought I lied about Tom.”

“You did lie about Tom,” she says, putting the glass to her lips. Liquid courage. 

“Semantics. I didn't lie about the fact that he's a danger to you."

“Everything is a game to you, isn’t it? You’re playing chess with the whole world, just so you can prove how clever you are.”

He sips thoughtfully.

"Think like a profiler, Lizzie. What was it that made you feel angry? Being lied to? The idea that you had been playing the game but failed to predict the next move?” He raises an eyebrow, as if to dismiss the idea. "If I remember correctly, one of the very first things I did warn you about was how truthfulness isn't exactly in my nature."

"Maybe it was the fact that I believed it," Liz says, her voice raw with the honesty of it. "You told me that the man I loved was a criminal who had deceived me from the start. And instead of seeing it as the false accusation it was, I considered it a possibility."

"So you believe that loving somebody means never assuming the worst about them?"

"Loving somebody means trusting them to not secretly be a sociopathic assassin,” Liz says decidedly, letting herself rest against the soft couch. The wine swirls lazily in her glass.

"I know how it feels to always keep your cards close to your chest. I know. I was never sure if Tom could love me if he knew all there is to know about me." She grimaces. "Well, that is a moot point now, anyway."

"You think that knowing about your worst secrets would make it impossible for somebody to love you."

There is only one sip left in her glass, a dark red stain at the bottom. One day she'll make use of her education as a profiler and examine her unfortunate habit of drinking up everything Red Reddington pours out for her. 

"No reason not to," Liz mumbles, letting her head fall back, the tight muscles in her neck straining with the movement. Her limbs feel loose, like she is lowering herself into a warm bath. Distantly, she thinks that there is really no way that one glass of wine can make her feel this relaxed, but her thoughts are slow and vaguely blurry, and there is no urgency to them. 

Liz can feel her eyelids sliding closed. The glass disappears from her hand. Red’s presence next to her feels like a fever dream, but his hand on her cheek is warm and real. 

Finally, she sleeps.

 

\--

 

Liz wakes up to sound of water splashing onto wood. The ground beneath her is swaying, making her stomach twist with the movement. She opens her eyes all the way to brilliant blue sky, and when she looks down she sees what seems to be the deck of a yacht somewhere in the middle of the ocean. All of this makes the very distinct impression of not being the couch that Liz fell asleep upon. 

Son of a bitch. 

Across from her, Red is sitting in a basket chair in a beige linen suit and a straw hat, drinking a strawberry daiquiri and looking unbearably smug. 

"You drugged me!" 

She reaches for her holster to realize that it’s gone, her head thrumming with the sudden movement. 

Dembe, in a pair of hideous Bermudas, appears next to her, offering her a bottle of water and possibly trying to prevent her from jabbing pointy things into Red’s jugular, which is a shame, because she can’t think of many things she would like quite as much. 

"That's a very harsh way to put it, isn't it?" Red pops a strawberry into his mouth. "I made use of a light chemical sedation to increase your travel comfort. Those twelve hours must have flown by on gilded wings."

"If you ever develop an idea of what boundaries are, let me now.” 

She leans back, closing her eyes against the brightness of the sun. 

"Don't you want to know at all where our little field trip has taken us?"

"Let me guess: The ocean?"

"A very lovely foreign country that is also meeting point with a very interesting client. I'm sorry, Lizzie, but the location of this kind of place has to remain undisclosed. You do, after all, work for the FBI, and if you knew, I'm afraid you'd be inclined to tell."

When she opens her eyes again he has spread a number of photographs and official-looking files out over a table in front of her like a deck of cards. Some of them look suspiciously like FBI material to her. 

"I'm pretty sure kidnapping agents is not covered by the conditions of your deal. And they’ll be able to pinpoint your location with your tracking device anyway.”

Red’s hand moves up to his throat reflexively and the next thing she sees is the little flap of white gauze sticking out from under his collar. 

"You have to be kidding me,” Liz groans. Of course he would endure minor surgery for the possibility of dragging her to the Bahamas in sedation. _Of fucking course._

"It will be replaced as soon as the meeting is over," Red says cheerfully. "I know an excellent surgeon who owes me a favor. You see, I am willing to make sacrifices in our working relationship, I don't see the big deal in the innocent use of a few narcotics."

Maybe a bigger person would have refrained from throwing the water bottle at his shoulder just for the satisfaction of seeing Raymond Reddington wincing in pain.

 

\--

 

She doesn't speak to him for two weeks. When he shows up at the Post Office, she shoves a stack of files at him, the most tedious and boring cold cases she could find, and tells him to make himself useful. 

Five days and six arrests later, he reappears with three cartons of donuts and a shiny espresso machine for the bullpen. 

Seven days later, he pulls the emergency stop on the elevator with just the two of them in it.

"I'm sorry I drugged you," Red says with an impatient wave of his hand. "But you are being very difficult about this, and it doesn't work."

"I don't want an apology."

"If this is about the glazed donuts, I'm sure I can - "

"I don't care if you're here to outsmart the FBI and make everybody look like morons,” Liz blurts, furiously, because she’s had it with the smartass replies. 

She’s been kidnapped and blown up and her marriage is a mess and her father died and she was, quite recently, drugged and put on a plane halfway across the world by the one person who told her she could trust him without reservations, and if there is something resembling rock bottom for her, this is probably it.

“I don't care about the things you do when you're not here. I don’t even care what kind of endgame you have, frankly, as long as we get this job done. But I'm not going to be a pawn to be pushed around your chessboard.”

Her scar is itching like an old war wound. She can barely resist curling her nails against the flawed skin, pushing down.

“ If this thing is supposed to work, you will cut the bullshit and give me the whole story, not just the little tidbits of it that you think are appropriate. And the next time you take advantage of me lowering my defenses around you”, she says loudly, right over his affronted expression, “ I will put a bullet into your head and make it look like one of your adversaries had a lucky day."

"I wasn't -," Red starts, before closing his mouth again. He turns his palms up in surrender, full of empty air. He looks the closest to nervous she’s ever seen him. 

"Liz, you have to understand that the only reason I'm here is you."

That sets her right off again. 

"Well, that's too bad, because I'm not your damn conscience.” She steps forward, pushing all the way into his personal space. Red stays perfectly still, and suddenly she’s so close that she can see the pulse beating in his neck. 

"I'm not just going to stand there and watch while you use the FBI for your personal vendetta against the scum of the world."

The elevator is too small for the things that hover in the air between them. The whole world is. 

"I’m not going to trail you and your leads like an obedient dog. We're equals or we're done. Your call."

She steps away from him and flicks the emergency switch off. The elevator starts running again with a shudder. Her heart pounds furiously in her chest. 

"I'm sorry I drugged you," Red says, and his voice is all different, small in a way she didn't think Raymond Reddington could sound like. The sound touches a tender, vulnerable spot somewhere inside her, and she clenches her teeth to make it shut up. 

"You know, I don't know how you did it, but you made me take a leap of faith with you, and you make me do it again and again with every case. If it turns out I was wrong to trust you all along, I'm not sure I could take it."

The door opens with a pneumatic hiss. She strides out without turning back to him, the clicking of her heels on the ground like the faint rattling of gunfire.

\--

 

The next day, there’s a thick manila folder on her desk tied together with string.

The post-it stuck to it says: _No # 32. The whole story. - Red_

When she calls him, he picks up after the second ring.

“You should come back to work,” she says.

“I’m afraid that for as long as we keep working together, I will continue to make things difficult for you. I will, however, do my best not to make them difficult on purpose.” 

“I’m not sure I’d know how to deal with anything that isn’t difficult, at this point,” she says. 

His laugh is warm and soft in her ear like a caress. 

\--

 

Liz knows the catalogue of psychiatric terms she could apply to someone like Red Reddington. She has seen the results of his work flickering in high-resolution footage across the screens. 

She calls him a monster once and his eyes are gentle. _Of course that's what I am, do try to keep up._

Locked in a box in the middle of a small war, he looks at her like she is the only thing that could hurt him.

\--

He meets her eyes in the ambulance and then everything goes to hell and he’s gone. 

Liz thinks, distantly, over a glass of wine alone in her apartment, that there is a chance that he will just check out of her life forever, untraceable for the FBI. 

Maybe she should feel relieved, considering the battlefield Raymond Reddington has turned her life into. Maybe a normal person would be glad that it’s finally over.

\--

A normal person certainly wouldn’t sit alone in a dark living room, replaying the moment in the ambulance on loop in her head. A normal person might be able to forget the look on his face just before he gave up the code, that terrifying smile, the way he just stood there, hands slick with blood, letting himself be dragged away to torture and possible death for her. 

\--

 

The phone rings. 

\--

She would love to think that facing him in her living room isn’t giving her a feeling of gratitude, of relief, but she’s afraid that once she starts lying to herself she’ll never be able to stop. 

When Red gets up to leave she jumps to her feet, cornering him, and for a second something flashes in his eyes like he’s expecting a blow, a razor-sharp word. For a second she’s not sure that isn’t what she’s going to do, and then her arms are around his neck and she’s pulling him close, face pressed into his shoulder and fingers wound tightly into his shirt. 

She can feel him relaxing under her touch, letting her in, his hands resting on her back. All that he says is her name, once, like applying pressure to a wound.

\--

 

When they finally get video footage of the next number on the list, a grainy security feed in a train station, Nicholas Lewis looks up at the camera with the face of her husband. 

Liz locks herself in a toilet stall, trying to quell the heaving sobs that threaten to rise from her chest. Distantly, she hears Ressler knocking on the door, two, three times, before leaving. 

She dials Red’s number and starts talking before he has a chance to open his mouth.

“You were right. I wanted to send you a card to celebrate, but they were out of _“Congratulations on predicting correctly that my husband is evil”_ at the store.”

“I take no pleasure in being right about this, Lizzie,” he says after a pause. “I’m very sorry.”

She hangs up. If there’s something she can take even less from him than smug superiority, it might be actual compassion. 

 

\--

 

To be fair, by the time you have placed a number of CIA issue tracking devices in various places on the personal belongings of your spouse, it’s probably safe to say your marriage is in trouble.

 

\--

 

The FBI special Ops team, unsurprisingly, doesn’t manage to capture Nicholas Lewis, known as Tom Keen. The house is deserted by the time they kick down the door, like Liz had been living there alone all along. 

_In a way_ , the little voice in her head supplies, _she has._

Cooper tells her the result of the operation with his most official facial expression.  
Ressler hands a cup of coffee to her, too sweet with sugar, and puts his hand on her shoulder like an afterthought. 

\--

 

It’s three thirty in the morning when the phone rings.

“I never got a chance to say goodbye,” the man she knew as Tom says.

“I never got a chance to put a knife in your liver. We all have regrets.”

There is a faint hum in the distance like the engine of an airplane. 

"There's no reason to make this personal, Liz. A job is a job, if somebody should know that, it's you." 

She swallows the stab of pain like a bad taste in her mouth. 

“Don’t worry, you mean absolutely nothing to me,” Liz answers, satisfied with the way it comes out, mostly steady. “My husband is dead.”

"I was just calling to say goodbye. We both know that you won't track me down, so I thought it would be a nice gesture. After all we’ve been through.”

“Goodbye, Tom,” she says, the little blue dot of the GPS signal on the monitor next to her blinking in the darkness like a beacon. 

 

\--

 

“If there is something you want to talk about,” Red says, pointedly looking out of the window, “I want you to know that I’m here.”

“I’m fine.” 

Liz touches the place where her wedding band was, a small pale stripe on her skin. 

“If we got on the plane now, we’d be just in time for an aperitif on the Piazza della Signoria. You would adore Florence, Lizzie. I can just see you having a glass of wine in the little corner cafés, strolling along the shops on the Ponte Vecchio bridge.”

He closes his eyes, like he’s actually imagining it.

“I could hardly decide which place to take you to dinner first.”

“I’m not having dinner with you,” Liz says, opening the door of the car. 

“Really? You’ve been quite ambiguous about the question.”

There’s a challenge in his eyes when he looks at her, and she holds his gaze for a second too long. It feels like burning your hand on a hot surface, just better, sharp and real. 

For a second, Liz considers telling him that one thing she could never tell anyone else and have them understand, but then he looks away and the moment is over, and she gets out of the car and walks in circles around her own neighborhood, collar turned up against the darkness around her. 

 

\--

These are the same hands that have held guns and peeled away the wires on bombs.  
Liz has seen the way the sharp flick of Red's wrist with a blade, sharp enough to cut before the pain blooms to the surface. She knows that he is at his most gentle before pushing someone into a bathtub foaming with acid.

She takes things from those hands, glasses of wine and secrets and other dangerous, dangerous things. She lets him put his hands on the jagged cuts that she seems to collect like stamps, lets him probe the old blood that collects under her skin: war paint and proof. 

He stitches her up and hides her cuts under clean white gauze and puts the back of his palm to her forehead as if checking for a fever. Then he always pulls back, unfolding himself from the chair, the couch, straightening his suit like putting on armor.

 

\--

 

"Do you ever get fed up with it?" she asks Ressler, over Thai take-away, both of them typing up overdue reports. 

"With what?" He rubs his eyes, bloodshot and unfocused.

Liz moves her hand around in a gesture that encompasses the whole room.

"The rules. The protocols. The way everybody makes decisions about you." She huffs out a laugh. "The way we never beat anyone, really, because they have the kind of resources and escape plans that we can't even begin to imagine."

Ressler shrugs. "I don't mind. You follow your orders, you give it everything you got. There's no way to control the rest." He prods at his rice with a chopstick. "Is this about Reddington?"

Isn't everything?, she thinks.

"It's about me, actually.”

It really is. 

"There is a reason for those rules. They stop us from making choices just because we want to. They stop us from playing god."

They drink their stale coffee in silence.

"Listen, I get that you want to do more. It's what got you to this job in the first place. But there are limitations to the work we can do. Because if you start living by your own code, walking around and wreaking havoc? You're not a good guy. You're a bad guy.” He gives her a lopsided smile. “You’re not a bad guy, Keen.”

"Thanks for the pep talk," she says, rolling her eyes and unwrapping a chocolate bar from the vending machine down the hall. 

"You're welcome," Ressler says, draining his coffee. "Just make sure that Reddington doesn’t get to you. Whatever he told you about the two of you being the same, it's just bullshit to mess with your head."

Liz watches him walk away. Ressler is, as usual, running on sheer will and caffeine, gritting his teeth in determination. 

Her phone chirps.

THE WITNESS YOU WERE LOOKING FOR TRIPPED  
AND FELL INTO A PAIR OF HANDCUFFS

SPECIAL DELIVERY TO THE POST OFFICE Y/N?

RED

 

Liz types back.

 

I’LL COME BY AND PICK HIM UP

 

Another chirp.

 

WITNESS TO GO IT IS, THEN

 

She puts her phone back into her purse.

“Good news?” Ressler hands her a fresh cup of coffee. 

“How did you know?” She closes her report and takes her coat.

“You’re smiling. It’s a little disturbing.”

She rolls her eyes at him on the way out.

 

\--

 

"You need to stop getting stabbed," Liz says into the half-darkness of the limousine. "Or maybe go and buy yourself a hospital."

Red peels the sleeve of his shirt back to reveal a jagged cut on his arm, from when he got between her and a Serbian assassin. Unnecessarily, since she had already landed a well-placed kick to the guy’s groin and managed to pull her gun on him. Leave it to Red to endure significant blood loss and possible tendon damage before letting her be hurt by somebody. 

Liz has the box with alcohol swipes and tourniquets and syringes open in her lap while Dembe sits in the front seat, throwing them watchful glances through the rearview mirror and steering the car through the lazy evening traffic.

She takes out a clean compress, folds it up and presses it down to where the blood is constantly welling up beneath the broken skin. She can see that Red clenches his teeth in pain from the way his jaw tenses, but he stays quiet, his head swaying a little to the side with the movement of the car.

"Stop trying to throw yourself in front of me, it's stupid.”

The air smells sickeningly of the iron tang of blood. Her hands are shaking with the adrenaline crash. 

"Have dinner with me," Red says, weakly. 

She tightens a bandage around his arm, pressing down.

"There is somebody who can fix medical emergencies," Dembe says, meeting her eyes in the mirror.

"We'll have dinner when you're not dying," Liz tells Red distractedly before meeting Dembe’s eyes in the mirror. “How long?”

“With the current traffic, approximately fifteen minutes.”

Red's face is snow pale and shiny with sweat. Liz wonders whether she misjudged the amount of blood he has lost, bravado over actual pain. She feels the pulse at the side of his throat with two fingers, trying to gauge the relative risk of just getting him to the nearest hospital. She remembers, suddenly, with perfect clarity the warmth of his blood against her hand, feeling the soft _thud-thud-thud_ of his pulse against her fingers.

Red turns his head, letting the side of his face rest against the palm of her hand. 

"You're better than the best thing I've ever done, Lizzie," he mumbles, eyelids fluttering. 

Liz clasps his hand in hers. 

"This will need stitches," she says, urgently, mostly to Dembe. 

Dembe is moving swiftly through the lanes into a part of the city she doesn't recognize.

"I lied when I said that I didn't know what happened to Tom," Liz finally says. She hadn’t expected that it would feel so good just to tell him. 

Red blinks at her from where his head is resting heavily against the back of the seat.

"I put a tracking device on him and found his location. I gave the information to the kind of people he wouldn’t want to have it." She takes a deep breath, lightheaded with the smell of blood. "I could have arrested him. It’s what I should have done. But the law doesn’t work with people like him. He’ll be in prison for a few months, then there will be something - a fire or an accident and they’ll let their guard down and they’ll lose him and once they do, he’ll disappear forever.”

She can feel the tears behind her eyelids like needles. Dembe takes a sharp left turn, the car rumbling over a bumpy road. 

"I'm tired of playing by the rules when all I do is keep losing,” she whispers, his fingers interlaced with hers, leaning her body into his like an anchor. “I'm so tired, Red. And I don’t know if what I’m doing is right. I no longer care.”

For a moment, she's afraid that he has lost consciousness, the beating against her skin faint and weak. Then, he moves under her hands, opening his eyes.

"Thank you for telling me that," Red says.

Liz doesn't let go of his hand. 

 

\--

As it turns out, Dembe knows a number of very efficient shortcuts.

\--

She gets a call from Dembe two days later, telling her, simply "He said to tell you that he will stop getting stabbed the day people stop trying to stab you."

Five days later, Red calls her from a bazaar in Tunis, offering to fly her in for a glass of fresh peppermint tea.

\--

She's on her way home when her phone chirps.

ST REGIS HOTEL  
923 16TH STREET  
ROOM 432  
HURRY

RED

 

Liz pushes the pedal to the floor and drives to the hotel in record time, abandoning the car to run through the lobby and head right for the stairs. She draws her gun in the hall and kicks down the door to 432.

Red looks up at her from a table set with white linen and shiny silver cutlery. The waiter, a young man with short brown curls who must have been in the process of opening a bottle of wine when she rushed in, gives her a terrified look. 

"I appreciate your swift appearance, Lizzie, but I believe kicking down the door was excessive."

"What the hell is going on?"

She puts the gun away before Wine boy faints or, worse, calls the police.

"FBI." She flashes her badge. If anything, Wine boy looks even more alarmed. 

"Sure, Ma'am." He shoots a nervous glance at the door. Red gives him a pleasant smile and presses a tightly folded bill into his palm. 

"Thank you, that would be everything for now."

Wine boy leaves the room with the speed of somebody fleeing a war zone, closing the door behind her. 

"This isn't an emergency at all, is it." 

She sits down in the chair across from him, legs suddenly heavy with exhaustion. 

"I never said that it was an emergency." Red pushes the glass closer to her. "But the saffron risotto is most enjoyable while it's still hot, so time was of the essence."

Liz sighs and takes a sip of wine. It's excellent, it always is, and there is really no point in arguing with somebody who breaks rules for a living. 

"So, who are we meeting? Should I bother to call backup or is it all hush-hush, the FBI can't even know we're here again?"

"We're not meeting anyone."

He puts a plate in front of her that contains a serving of vibrantly yellow rice and artfully arranged shrimps. Her stomach growls with hunger. The last thing she ate was a small bag of pretzels from the vending machine, roughly at noon. 

"You said we'd have dinner when I'm not dying," Red says. "I am currently not dying. I've checked."

"So now you’re bullying me into having dinner with you?" 

"I am inviting you to have dinner with me. You're free to leave at any time. But in that case you'd miss out on the most amazing crème brûlée."

He smiles at her over the rim of his glass. Red sits on his chair with his usual detached expression, but she can see the tension in the line of his brow, the corners of his mouth. Like this has been about more than just dinner all along. 

“Ask me,” she says, standing up again, stepping two, three, four steps backwards to the door.

He looks at her with a curious expression. 

“Not a game of chess,” she reminds him. “If you want me to have dinner with you, ask me to have dinner with you.”

Red smiles, and for some reason the sight of his challenging smirk pulls at something inside her, makes her skin tingle.

“You’re going to say no.”

“Try me,” Liz says, feeling daring and irresponsible, her FBI badge burning hot against her skin like a crucifix. 

“Would you like to have dinner with me?”

She takes the steps towards him slowly, one by one.

“Yes.”

When he gets up to pull the chair out for her, his hands graze her back, lingering. 

“I’d rather not have any wine if you don’t mind,” Liz says.

His smile is all teeth. 

 

\--

 

These are the same hands that have held guns and peeled away the wires on bombs.

She pulls him up and he lets her, placing his knees on both sides of her legs, pushing his palm into hers so that their fingers curl together like a knot. 

"Tell me to go, Lizzie," Red says.

Like there is a way out of this for either of them.

“Do you want to go?” Liz has to look up at him now, craning her neck to meet his eyes. “Do you think you should?”

"I think that knowing about my worst secrets would make it impossible for somebody to love me,” Red says. “And I think you know more about them than just about anyone else.”

“I wasn’t talking about love,” Liz says, enjoying the way his gaze drops down to where her body is stretched out beneath him before returning to her face, slowly, deliberately.  
“I was talking about what you _want_.”

She can see the tension in the line of his shoulders, perfectly still like a soldier who stepped onto a landmine, waiting for the blast of fire.  
“I don’t deserve half of the things that I want,” Red says, helplessly, like she has pulled at a single string and now all of him is coming apart. 

She can feel his hand squeezing hers briefly before starting to pull away:  
Always an escape route.

Liz puts her free hand on his neck, holding him in place. 

“Isn’t that what the bad guys do?” 

There’s a part of her that knows that this is it, this is the moment:  
This is where Elisabeth Keen walks right off the cliff. This is where she finds out how fast she will fall if she dares to look down.

“Bad guys take what they want, when they want it. No asking for permission. No regrets.”

Red’s mouth tightens. The expression in his eyes makes something flutter in Liz’s chest, in that spot that she thought was going to be hollow and quiet forever. 

“Things are different with you, Lizzie.”

She lets go of his hand to put her hand to the side of his face like she did in the limousine, enjoying the way he leans into her touch, shuddering with pleasure. 

“I wasn’t talking about you, Red,” Liz says, waiting for his eyes to widen in realization before pulling his mouth against hers, down, down, down. 

 

\--

 

One day Agent Elisabeth Keen walks out of the Post Office and never walks back in, leaving her gun and badge on Agent Ressler’s desk like a suicide note. 

 

\--

 

One day Raymond Reddington simply ceases to exist. Pressed for an answer, the FBI would suggest that one of the numerous people with reason to kill him have finally succeeded.  
Then again, the FBI has been wrong before.

 

\--

 

Some of the names on the blacklist turn up in the trunk of a car parked in front of the FBI headquarters, burglar alarm blaring.  
Some of the names turn up tied to office chairs inside high-security top secret locations, complete with extensive portfolios on their crimes. 

Some of the names are not as lucky.  
They never turn up at all.

\--

 

If you ever meet them, they will probably not introduce themselves to you. That’s fine, you’ve heard all about them, anyway. 

One of them is the most dangerous person you’ve ever met.

The other one is Raymond Reddington. 

This, too, is a beginning.


End file.
